#BUandBoston: “Criminalized” Sheds Light on Systemic Failures
By: Douglas Darrah
“Criminal” is not a state of being but a label that is strategically assigned. That is the premise of Criminalized, Sarika Ram’s (CAS ‘21) new podcast. Throughout her first season, she interviews formerly incarcerated people and explores who is and is not deemed a criminal in the United States.
In her first episode, she interviews Calvin, a community activist who spent his childhood going in and out of prison. Many teenagers from white, wealthy communities fight, steal, do drugs, and never face consequences. But Calvin’s race and his zip code led to him being labeled as a violent criminal for doing those same things.
Another episode examines how addiction is criminalized. In order to cope with mental illness, Meghann began using harder and harder drugs to self medicate when she was a teenager. Eventually, she entered a cycle of addiction and incarceration. She was jailed while pregnant and narrowly escaped having to give birth while chained to a bed. Thousands of women are not as lucky.
Bill, a registered sex offender, tells his story in her most recent episode. He was sexually assaulted as a child and went on to perpetuate the harm on others. The criminal justice system did not interrupt that cycle and denied him the means to escape it.
Hearing these stories motivates Ram to continue her work. She noted that these are not isolated stories, they “reflect the experiences of so many who are involved with the justice system. It excites me to be able to continue doing this work and serving people.” She wants to show the larger public that the legal system is “perpetuating this label of being criminal or being dangerous to folks who are experiencing social injustice.” She also examines how “in the United States we basically use the system to address many social problems” that cannot be fixed by locking people up.
Criminalized began while Ram was a student in Anne Donahue’s audio journalism class. Ram had been researching a criminal justice reform bill that was being debated in the Massachusetts Legislature. It challenged her “very naive assumption” that the legal system is an “objective purveyor of justice that is built on the presumption of innocence.” She decided that telling people’s stories on a podcast would be “a really compelling way to convey what the social science literature has been showing us for a long time.”
As a sociology major, her classes inform many aspects of her writing. She invokes academic concepts like the broken windows theory of policing and the school to prison pipeline to contextualize the stories. Before interviewing her subjects, she goes back and rereads any relevant literature that she encountered in her classes. She also works with groups like the New England Innocence Project to ensure that she has covered every relevant angle.
Every one of Ram’s episodes ends with a call to action. She encourages her viewers to volunteer at programs like Petey Greene, a program that helps formerly incarcerated people rebuild their lives, and to donate to the ACLU and other groups that are advocating for the civil rights of incarcerated people. These groups are fighting for the change that Ram wants to see.
Criminalized is funded by the BUild Lab and can be streamed on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
This post is part of our #BUandBoston series, highlighting the work and research of BU students, faculty, and staff throughout the City of Boston. Interested in having your Boston-related work featured? Tag us on Instagram or Twitter @BUonCities using the #BUandBoston or send us an email at ioc@bu.edu.